CK - Washington.   In Microsoft Risks Copyright Impotence, Washington lawyer John Mitchell argues convincingly that certain Microsoft software licenses constitute a misuse of copyright law and, therefore, have no effect. The same type of license is found for many published works.

Mitchell analogizes certain MS license terms to attempts by movie moguls to tie duds to hot titles, resulting in unenforceable copyrights.

Recently, the monopolist attempted to prevent a Linux supporter from demonstrating how to run MS's FoxPro in a windowing environment other than MS's, in violation of MS's license terms.

Since tie-ins generally are suspicious and have been found so when software was bundled with required hardware and services, and since monopolies such as copyrights and patents are bound to the limits imposed by law, Mitchell's analysis is worth a read, and enjoyable to boot.

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